The invention relates to advice of charge of calls and especially to advice of charge in a cellular mobile system utilizing an intelligent network, in which system the service provider can use in its service the services of other service providers and/or different network operators.
The subscriber of a telecommunications network—for instance a fixed network or a mobile network—can be offered a large number of different services by means of an intelligent network (IN). One such service is advice of charge which gives the caller an estimate on the charge of the made call. Calculating an advice of charge is generally supported by means of the intelligent network. A mechanism for calculating an advice of charge generally used in mobile networks is that the tariff level of the call is known on the basis of the dialled number and mobile subscription type (subscriber class mark). The tariff level can also be obtained from a service control point (SCP) of the intelligent network. The tariff level indicates the single-fee charge or time charge valid at each point of time. In other words, the tariff level indicates the AoC (advice of charge) E parameters valid at each point of time. The E parameters indicate how often and how many advice of charge pulses are generated. A specific price has been defined for the advice of charge pulse. The E parameters indicate, for instance, any free-of-charge time in the beginning of the call, the advice of charge pulses to be generated after the free-of-charge time has expired, advice of charge pulses being generated at specific intervals and the time between them. Either single-fee charging or time charging can be applied to a call. The used advice of charge algorithm is, however, always the same.
In providing services, the trend is towards using multi-provider environments in which a single service can use resources offered by several value added service providers and content providers. In addition, a service provider does not necessarily maintain the telecommunications network itself, but may buy the necessary network service from a network operator. The service can thus comprise a content service, a supplementary-service logic and an access service. Calculating the advice of charge of such a service requires the use of several different charging parameters. The total price of the service comprises the price of the content, the user charge of the supplementary-service logic and the price of the connection. Different content services (with different prices) of several different content providers can be used through the same service logic, and the logic can be used in the networks of several different operators whose connection services naturally have different prices. Thus, the number of combinations available for providing the service becomes very large. In addition, different combinations have different prices. Also, since the different services use different resources, the calculation algorithm of prior art advice of charge with its E parameters cannot provide real-time data on the actual costs.